17 Unique Places to Find Great Content to Share

I get a particular thrill from finding little-known restaurants that serve amazing food. My greatest hits list includes elk tacos at a highway diner, cinnamon rolls at a downtown hole-in-the-wall, and – perhaps my greatest discovery of all – barbecue from a trailer in a parking lot. (Seriously, it’s good barbecue!)

The discovery process for great content has a similar thrill. How great does it feel to share a bit of awesomeness that few others have found?

People love a good content share. And in order to give the people what they want, sometimes you’ve got to dig a little deeper. Here are 17 unexpected places to look:

1. Email newsletters

We look at the inbox every day, but how often do we search it for great content? Perhaps we should consider email the original content discovery engine. You make your interests known (by signing up for newsletters), and your inbox delivers tailored content. Newsletters are often filled with hand-picked links of interest. The best ones have one or two new pieces of content that you can share each day. Here are a few to consider:

Next Draft

Managed by Dave Pell, this daily newsletter contains the day’s most fascinating news – a Top Ten of interesting links from around the web, often starting with current events and meandering into fun, off-beat, interesting links.

The Daily Digg

The newsletter offshoot of Digg.com, this daily email brings you up to speed on the top stories from yesterday with an uncanny knack for highlighting potentially viral content. Digg’s algorithms and users help identify the day’s most important stories, which you can glean for uniquely shareable content.

Austin Kleon

Author and illustrator Austin Kleon is one of the most unique marketing and motivational minds out there, and his newsletter reflects his eye for design and his keen curation of content off the beaten path.

Zen Habits

The Zen Habits newsletter delivers Leo Babuta’s popular insights into simplicity and peace. The stories here could provide a good balance to the marketing and social media posts in a stream.

SmartBrief

Newsletters from SmartBrief cover a vast array of topics and professions – 150 to be exact. The daily newsletters of curated content focus on a particular industry, and you can browse a deep list of topics to find ones that suit you (Tech and Business topics is a good place to start).

5 Intriguing Things by Alexis Madrigal

Pro tip: Once your inbox fills up with quality newsletters, you can manage them with Unroll.me, a service that rolls all your subscriptions into a daily digest. You can still click on individual links and read all the copy, and you get to do so from a slick dashboard with minimal impact on your inbox.

2. Subreddits

Reddit helps identify a wealth of valuable content as discovered and voted on by its deep user base. Specialized subreddits focus on a single topic and can be an ideal place to monitor up-and-coming links you can use. The full list of subreddits covers just about any topic you could imagine. Here are a few that might be relevant for digital marketers:

3. Pocket

Pocket is a multi-dimensional content finder. First and foremost, you can use the app like nature intended: Save the articles you find online to read later. Inside the app, Pocket will even notify you of what stories are popular and trending.

4. Topsy

Use Topsy to search popular stories around a chosen topic – you can even go so far as to home in on links, tweets, photos, videos or people specifically. The results page displays the top content that was shared recently as well as how many folks are talking about it.

“Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.” – Bernard Baruch

“You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.” – Mae West

6. The Latest

Built as a way to monitor what’s hot on Twitter (without actually monitoring Twitter yourself all day), The Latest prides itself on quality curation of top links. To accomplish this, the site polls a number of top influencers on Twitter and extracts and measures the links they share. The top ten links get added to the Latest homepage and are updated as new best-of links surface. You can also follow top stories on Twitter from The Latest.

7. BuzzSumo

Gauging the virality of an article sometimes seems like voodoo magic. How can you tell what people like when there’s so much of it out there? BuzzSumo helps separate the signal from the noise with a tool that collects all vital share stats and spits out a dashboard of top links. You can see what has performed best on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and overall, and the tool also lets you filter by date and content type (e.g., guest posts, video, infographics).

8. Feedly

RSS feeds are well-known and loved (less loved now than they used to be, but still), and Feedly is one of the top RSS readers around. At a basic level, you can use Feedly to manage RSS feeds from the sites you follow, but when it comes to unique, unexpected content, try tapping into Feedly’s hashtag search. Simply type a word into the search bar at top and choose from a list of suggested Feedly topics. The results offer a variety of places to subscribe and discover new content.

9. Sidebar

Curating unique content with a design focus, Sidebar.io provides a daily list of top links that you can grab on the Sidebar homepage or in the Sidebar daily newsletter. A handful of human editors upvote submitted links to determine what reaches the Sidebar homepage on any given day. The results (up to five links) are posted and emailed out.

10. Twitter lists

Many Twitter power users rely on lists to make sense of their huge stream of tweets. Lists are an ideal, minimal way to focus on a smaller number of voices—no @ replies or Retweets show up in the stream for a list, and you can choose which Twitter users get added. A common practice is to set up a list around a topic (e.g., startups, design) or a group of people (e.g., influencers, coworkers). Here are a few handy ones to get started:

11. Medium collections

The blogging platform Medium has an incredibly deep well of shareable content, much of which is highlighted on the Medium home page. For an even finer degree of curation, you can hop onto collections built by Medium’s users. Here are a few examples:

12. Slideshare

Two things make Slideshare a great source for original content: 1) the quality of the submissions are top-notch with presentations from some of the top voices in digital marketing, and 2) the content is visual—pictures, graphs, etc.—meaning a huge opportunity for added engagement.

13. What’s Trending on Google+ and Pinterest

Of course, the top social media networks also have a pretty good idea of what content is popular. All you have to do is ask!

Google+ tracks its rising content in a section titled Hot and Recommended. Its algorithms pull up-and-coming content that has resonated on the network or is about to. To reach this feature, click on the Explore link on your top navigation bar, then choose “What’s Hot” from the list of tags.

16. Prismatic

Like Flipboard, Prismatic discovers great new content and delivers it in a beautiful way to your mobile device. You can follow people and interests and send feedback by voting on the stories you like best. The latest version supports reading later and saving stories to Pocket.

17. Fre.sh

And lastly, here’s something a bit different. The team at Buzzfeed built Fre.sh as a quick view at the fastest rising stories on the web. Many of the top stories have a celebrity-entertainment focus, but the category range is so wide that if you dig deep enough you should be able to find something relevant for your profile.

Interestingly, on the Buffer’s Openness Blog, they revealed that they are providing curation suggestions now. It will be interesting to see how other apps respond as Buffer’s offerings become more robust. Since Buffer is often compared to Hootsuite, this could be a big differentiator.

Many I didn’t know yet. What I loved was Zite where you could find links from sources outside of your usual references. Don’t know what will happen after being acquired by Flipboard.
I would also add Quibb to this list : a lot of quality articles there.

Helpful. This is cool post and i enjoy to read this post. your blog is fantastic and you have good staff in your blog. nice sharing keep it up.
This is cool post and i enjoy to read this post. your blog is fantastic and you have good staff in your blog. nice sharing keep it up. city select double stroller

Hey Kevan! Do you feel frustrated by the WP default that causes images to link to themselves? Try this:

To change the default for images (so you don’t have to choose “none” on the image links to checkboxes every time you insert an image into a post), you can go to yoursite.com/wp-admin/options.php; find the image_default_link_type option, and change the value from “file” to “none”.

Holly McIlwain

Kevan, really appreciate this list. I didn’t know half of these. @syedbalkhi told me about Twitter Lists at WordCampBHAM last year and I need to check into it and these others. I also get content ideas form Pinterest. Thanks Y’all.

Yeah, I’d love to read that. So far I’ve had 2 followers tell me that they love it (unsolicited), and one mentioned to me today to tone it down (but still enjoys the content, just not so frequently). I’m currently rocking 3 articles per day and filling the rest of the time with replies and status updates. Will continue to monitor and compare analytics on that.

Robb_Henshaw

Great list, Kevan – thanks! There were a couple of new ones (for me at least) on here that I’ll be giving a try. And @David – thanks for the head’s up on noosfeer, too – very cool. I’d also love to invite you to check out my company’s site, http://www.inpwrd.com (inPowered). Search for anything, and we show you all the most influential articles on that topic (based on the author’s authority, how much they write about that topic, how many times each article has been read & shared, etc.). And we enable you to amplify those articles (for free) to your social channels, plus we measure the lift in reads, shares, time people spent reading, etc. based on your amplification. Would love to hear your thoughts. And thanks again for this great resource!

I’m so glad you didn’t include blog.bufferapp.com (because that would have been cheesy, and probably goes without saying to your audience) but your content is always fantastic and this blog would have made my list. Thanks!

Brillliant list; I’ll have to spend some serious time browsing all of them.

However, I have to warn people using quotes from Goodreads – the site does not check them so you’ll stand a good chance of using a wrong quote. Which wouldn’t be the wisest move, obviously.

Agnes Dadura

Great list 🙂 I added some of them, but realistically I know I will not be able to read all of them daily. But from time to time 🙂 I read LinkedIn’s Pulse daily.

Meena

This is awesome 😮
Thank You! 😀
Stumble Upon is a great site too 🙂

jsmithitaly

Read theskimm – it is great – fresh – concise and informative – check it out

Tiffany Martin

Hi Kevan, Thank you for a great article. I’ve saved it to my pocket! Also, I wanted to add another place to find content to share: NoteStream. NoteStream is a new mobile app that shares content on a variety of topics presented in a series of short notes designed to easily read and shared. The content is contributed by authors and experts. You can go to http://www.notestream.com to learn more or download it for free in the apple app store.

Kavi

Thanks for the list, how about Scoop it?

Rose Begonia

Most of the tools that I use and now can’t live without, I found because they were recommended by Buffer. Thanks for all the quality content! 🙂

Hey that was an excellent list. I am using flipboard and google+ for content promotion of my psychology related website. http://www.humanquirks.com
I had no idea there were so many other options !! Thanks

Robin Clues

Very nice list of the content sharing sites, thanks for sharing it with us!

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